Salman Rushdie and his novels are the victim of extraordinary circumstances. Photo: Mail Today

FIRST a confession: Sir Salman Rushdie's latest is a decent stuff from his literary stable. It may not be among his finest but, to his credit, he has avoided being too philosophical, an overdose of which marred most of his recent novels, especially the last one. To add to it, what goes in The Golden House's favour is its underlying political undertone. Donald Trump rescues the book the same way Indira Gandhi did in the case of Midnight's Children and Ayatollah Khomeini vis-a-vis The Satanic Verses.

But where Sir Salman fails - and has been failing over the last decade-and-a-half at least - is that he has become predictable. Like the potboiler of his almost namesake in Bollywood, his work appears formulaic. He ceases to surprise anymore. The novelist lets Bombay mix with New York, Ibn Rushd with ISIS-type Islamists, and Arabian Nights-like fairy tales with modern politico-religious fault lines. The end result is a book overloaded with philosophical imageries, but lacking in content. It's more about style rather than substance. And worse, it appears like a rehash of his old books with the current decade's political polish. Donald Trump, who is referred to as the Joker in The Golden House, is the latest tool.

Rushdie's 12th novel looks at Trump's America through the Golden family, a wealthy tycoon who mysteriously arrives in New York and takes up residence with his three sons in a palatial Manhattan home. We are later informed about his mafia past and how he had fled from Bombay.

The names of the characters, too, follow the typical Rushdiean pattern. They invariably get inspired from the past characters, sometime mythical, sometime classical, and in some cases religious as well. No wonder the wealthy patriarch reinvents himself as Nero Golden and the children, who are forced to learn Greek and Latin in New York, take the names Petronius 'Petya', Lucius Apuleius 'Apu', and Dionysus or simply 'D'.

As for Bombay, now Mumbai, a constant phenomenon in almost all his novels, Rushdie again appears to be a lame caricature of his glorious past. "The bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding and yet the most Indian of Indian cities", as Rushdie introduced Bombay in The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), seems distant in The Golden House. The connect is missing. The irony is palpable when one reads his 2012 memoirs Joseph Anton to find out how his friends wondered after reading The Moor's Last Sigh: "You sneaked in, didn't you? You came quietly and soaked stuff up. Otherwise how would you have known all those things?"

Worse, the portrayal of New York, the city where he is currently living, is equally lame. He seems to be the victim of what Sir Vidia Naipaul once charged the Indians of "looking but not seeing". In the novel, New York is almost invisible, except for the elite quarter of Manhattan!

Rushdie, however, is the victim of extraordinary circumstances. The storm, which he faced post the 1989 fatwa, turned his world upside down. To his utter shock and disbelief, India was first to issue the Satanic Verses ban, which ironically came from the finance ministry! Under Section II of the Customs Act, the book was prevented from being imported. Interestingly, the ministry stated that the ban "did not detract from the literary and artistic merit" of the work!

The fatwa "gagged and imprisoned" Rushdie. He wrote in his journal: "I want to kick a football in a park with my son. Ordinary, banal life: my impossible dream." At another place he reiterates that "an ordinary moment became a crisis when invisibility was deemed essential."

The absence of ordinary moments coupled with the glitzy high life heralded the end of the novelist. He lost his zing and became a ghost of his past glory. Rushdie needs a makeover. Unfortunately, it seems an improbable task now. His work may not be as "bombastic and close to unreadable", as The New York Times wants us to believe, but it definitely has lost its edge.

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